Patagonia

Timesaving measures are in effect so we're going the picture-worth-a-thousand-words route. In summary: Patagonia is breathtakingly beautiful and terrifically windy. I spent a week backpacking the "W" trail in Parque Nacional Torres del Paine with two friends, we met up with Molly and Elise almost by accident on our second day and spent the rest of the time with them. We also met nearly the entire population of Germany on the trail, as well as probably half of Israel. Lots of laughter, lots of hiking, a little bit of snow, a little bit of rain, a little bit of sun. And now for the pictures.

Las Torres

Molly and Elise!

Sunrise hike to las Torres. Not much sun.

There's the sunrise!

Los Cuernos

El Glaciar del Francés

Molly and Elise were going the utilitarian camping route. No stove, lots of salami and cheese and trail mix

A cloudier day

El Glaciar Grey

Chiloé

At the end of November I spent 5 days in Chiloé in the south of Chile with three friends. We spent a day and a half in Ancud, a small town (but the second largest on the island) on the north end of the island, a day hiking and camping on the island’s remote west side, and two days in Castro, the island’s largest town/small city.

Ancud

One of the greatest pleasures of the trip was being surrounded by so much green for the first time in many months. As much as I have enjoyed living in a city, and Valparaíso is a beautiful city with beautiful views of the mountains and the ocean, I hadn’t really realized how much I missed seeing green things—green fields, green trees—until we arrived in the south. Chiloé is largely rural and as we rode the bus around the island I reveled in the farming landscape, dotted with sheep (sheeepieees!!!) and cows and small, old and beautifully constructed wooden houses. Every time we took a bus (and in total we took 16 buses on the trip, including getting to and from Valpo and Santiago), it was a struggle between wanting to look around at the landscape and the views of the smaller islands in the archipelago and wanting to give in to the drowsiness that being on a warm, moving bus always produces. I usually lost the battle in the end but still spent a good amount of the time soaking in the beautiful views.

Our largest adventure of the trip was the day we spent attempting to reach the national park. I say attempting because we never actually made it there but we camped in a park an hour or so before the entrance to the national park. My friend Dan had a guide book that said there was a bus from Ancud to Chepu, the closest town to the park, at 2 pm on Saturdays but after initially going to the wrong bus station, we found our way to the correct bus station and learned that there are in fact, no buses to Chepu on Saturday. Interesting kink in our plan. So we asked around and found out that the only way to get close to Chepu was to take a bus to Cruz 25 and then try to find a ride the last 15 km to Chepu. As we held a little conference to decide if that was what we wanted to do, the bus to Cruz 25 started pulling out of the station so that made our decision much quicker and we banged on the door, jumped on, and were off. I should mention that we had planned to go to the supermarket after checking what time the bus left but as it turned out we didn’t really have time for that. So when we boarded the bus we were equipped with 3 palta (avocados), 3 apples, 3 oranges, 3 pears, a bag of raisins, and 4 pieces of bread.

Cruz 25 is literally a truck stop along the highway, with one restaurant and a big sign kindly pointing the way to Chepu, 15 km down the gravel road. A woman in the restaurant told us that a bus to Chepu passes around 2, which was only half an hour away at this point, so we hung out in the parking lot and Grace taught us the “Thriller” dance, much to the amusement of some kids playing outside the restaurant. At about 2:40 we decided that we could no longer count on the bus just being on Chilean time (you may not all know this but Chilean time is between 25 and 45 minutes slow, for everything) and decided to start walking and hope that the bus or some kind soul in a truck would pass eventually.

Trekking to Chepu

It was a beautiful day and the walk was quite lovely, but we quickly realized that Chepu is what one might call a remote town. Others might call it the middle of nowhere. Very few cars passed and most that did were going the opposite direction. After walking nearly 4 km, we were on the verge of walking up to a house and asking if anyone would be willing to drive us down the road, when I saw a car coming over the hill towards us. So we “hicimos dedo” (literally make/do finger, aka hitchhike) and much to our relief, they stopped. Side note: I’m not one to consider hitchhiking a legitimate option in most circumstances but if there is anywhere in the world that you can hitchhike without worries, it would be Chiloé. Chileans are nice people in general but Chilotes are astonishingly friendly and warm and the island is the definition of sleepy tranquility.

So after an exciting ride in the back of the elderly Chilean couple’s truck and then another few kilometers walk, we made it to Chepu. And despite Dan’s assertions that it has to be a real town because in the guidebook there were several hostals listed, it is really more of a smattering of houses and pastures spread out along the Río Chepu. Our dreams of a supermarket (or even a minimarket!) quickly burst. Several people asked us if we were coming from “afuera” (outside) and they weren’t referring to outside of Chile, or even outside of Chiloé. Anything beyond Chepu constitutes outside.

We were told to ask for Alfonso Vergara, a fisherman who could take us across the river in his boat, and when we found him, he told us that there was no way we could make it to the national park and back by tomorrow. Since staying another day wasn’t an option with our limited supplies, we decided his suggestion of hiking to Parque Ahuenco, which he and his wife assured us was “precioso,” meaning very beautiful, was our best option. And best of all, his wife sold us 10 biscuit-like discs of bread.

In the end, all the hassles of getting there were completely worth it. In fact, all the hassles just made it better. Alfonso took us across the river and then led us through some fields out onto the entrance to one of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen. As we started walking down the sand dunes onto the beach, a horse ran out in front of us and galloped down the beach. At that point we decided that we were definitely not in the real world. We walked along the beach, past a rusted out shipwreck, past the horse again this time with a herd of cows, and up over the cliffs bordering the ocean. Each time we got to a lookout, it was more beautiful than the last. From the time we left Alfonso to the time he picked us up mid-day the next day, we didn’t see a single other person. We camped in a grassy area by the water and enjoyed a wonderful dinner of bread, palta, and raisins. The next morning was my friend Grace’s birthday so we had a celebratory breakfast of bread and oranges before hiking out. That night when we were back in the booming city of Castro, we had a true celebratory dinner, with a brindis (toast) to our adventures.

la playa 

Sunset at our campsite

The rest of our time we spent exploring small towns and islands near Castro and visiting the wooden churches for which the island is famous. We also ate curanto, the typical dish of Chiloé, which is a ground-cooked barbecue of mussels, clams, chicken, pork and chorizo. This has become an extremely long post so rather than describe our last few days, I’ll just put up some of the pictures. Enjoy! 

church in Dalcahue

the interior of the church in Castro

Los palafitos--houses on stilts over the water in Castro

Big ol' bowl of curanto

Oh heyyyy, remember me?

Aaaaaand….now it’s December. Did anyone else blink and miss November?

My blink was a rather hectic one, hence no blog posts for a month. Here’s what’s been keeping me busy.

At the beginning of November everyone on the Middlebury program went to Santiago for the weekend. We toured what is now called Parque de la Paz and was formerly Villa Grimaldi, a detention and torture center during Pinochet’s dictatorship. We were given a tour around the center by a man named Pedro Matta who was held and tortured there for nearly a year. It was, as you can imagine, a very moving and at times difficult story to listen to, not just his personal story but the story of all the prisoners who were held there. It is truly astonishing what barbarities humans are capable of committing against each other and it was sobering to think that such horrific experiences are not a thing relegated to the past but something that continues and something in which the US plays all too central a role in the world. 

Pedro Matta, in front of a wall with the names of the prisoners held at Villa Grimaldi

The Rose Garden, where women prisoners were raped and sexually tortured. When the park was created, one rose was planted for each victim and the signs have the names of the women on them

The most notable part of the experience for me was that Pedro Matta was able to tell us his experience and experiences of his close friends with very little visible emotion but when we then toured the National Cemetery and stood in front of Salvador Allende’s grave, he became choked up and couldn’t speak. To him, the part that still makes him emotional is the ideals for which Allende and his government stood and the hope that Allende held that he could transform Chilean society into a more just and equal one.

Interestingly, the National Cemetery is laid out in a manner that reinforces the traditional hierarchies of society. Cemeteries here are like little miniature versions of cities—the wealthiest families build elaborate tombs that resemble small houses or churches, the more middle-class tombs are stacked like apartments and the lower classes have smaller and shorter plots. The poorest section of the cemetery is one in which families rent a plot of land and when they can no longer afford to pay the rent, the remains are removed to make room for someone else. Ironically, Allende’s tomb is located in the very heart of the aristocratic section of the cemetery.

The other notable part of the tour around the cemetery was seeing the damage from the earthquake last February. Parts of the cemetery were closed off for repairs and one old mausoleum was crumbling and had lost its front cover so that you could actually see the remains. Kind of alarming.

On a much happier note, my sister came to visit after that weekend and I spent a week playing around Valparaíso with her and her friend. We ate lots of seafood, went to the beach and sand dunes, walked around Valparaíso and just generally had a grand old time.

Patented Molly-pose at the dunes

My friends and I somewhat unwittingly planned our only three trips of the semester to coincide perfectly with the end of classes and finals. So the end of November was extremely busy. First, we went to Buenos Aires. It was really fun to see another South American country and to spend time in a totally different city. Buenos Aires felt very European and cosmopolitan—quite different from little old Valparaíso. Basically I spent a lot of the weekend people-watching and soaking in the atmosphere and giggling at the Argentinean accent. We stayed in a hostel where we were definitely not cool enough or arsty enough to fit in with the rest of the guests so instead we spent all our time exploring the city. We walked a lot, went to the cemetery in Recoleta and searched for ages to find Eva Perón’s grave, went to an enormous street market, watched a capoeira performance in a park, went to the zoo (where you can buy little bags of food and feed the animals—but it was a choice between using our remaining pesos to feed the animals or feed ourselves and we chose to buy lunch for ourselves instead), the Museo de Bellas Artes and went to La Boca, the very touristy sector of the city where people dance tango in the street. And we ate like kings. We had two dinners at parillas (par-i-zhas in the Argentinean accent), which are Argentinean barbecue restaurants. Without a doubt the most delicious steaks I’ve had in my life. We met up with a friend of mine from Middlebury who’s spent the semester in Buenos Aires and it was great not only to spend time with him but also to have a knowledgeable tour guide to take us around the city. All around a great trip. 

Cemetery

La Puente de la Mujer

The next weekend we went to Chiloé, an island in the south of Chile and yesterday I got back from a week of backpacking in Torres del Paine National Park in Patagonia. For the sake of getting this post up, I’m going to write about those trips another day.

My classes have ended, I took the Spanish language-proficiency exam and now I just have two essays left to write for the Middlebury program. It would be a lot easier to get those done if it weren’t sunny and beautiful outside. I guess I’m just going to have to close my curtains and dig deep to find the discipline that I used to possess. It’s there somewhere. I'm off to search for it now.